Developer Hiring Blog

Rich Moy

Rich is a Content Marketing Writer at Stack Overflow, where he covers the latest in tech recruiting and developer engagement. When he's not writing, Rich can be found hanging with his wife, watching his favorite college football team with his dad, or running around Manhattan in preparation for his next marathon.

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Recent Posts

Invitations to holiday events may have a higher open rate than business emails, but even as things wind down around the office, the pressure to hire top tech talent remains. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of software developers to grow 24 percent from 2016 to 2026, tech recruiters can never take too much of a break from looking for talent.

With this post, we’re launching a monthly news round-up comprising some of the most compelling talent acquisition articles relative to tech. In November, industry experts were outspoken about how they’re addressing their current and future tech hiring needs. Since this is our first round-up, we also included a few reports you may have missed earlier this year.

For years, conventional thinking in the tech industry was that if you wanted to grow an idea into a sustainable business, you needed an office in San Francisco or New York. But that thinking has changed over the last few years. Some of the world's biggest companies are opening offices in emerging tech hubs like Wilmington, DE and Columbus, OH. These cities often offer more affordable real estate and access to untapped pools of talent.

For companies already operating out of these cities, this shift could make it even more difficult to attract and retain developers. We talked to HR leaders based in emerging tech hubs that are preparing to face this challenge. Here's their advice.

In 2006, Joel Spolsky wrote that the great software developers are never on the open market. This statement rings even truer today—and the potential business impact can’t be overstated. A new Korn Ferry study found that there will be a global talent shortage of more than 85 million people by 2030. The report concludes that left unchecked, the talent shortage could create a loss of $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues.

We recently updated Company Pages on Stack Overflow Talent to better showcase our customers’ employer brands. Updated pages are reviewed by a team of our developers on a rolling basis who are asking themselves: If Stack Overflow wasn’t so great, where would I want to work?

A few weeks ago, we featured our first batch of pages that stood out to them. Here are ten more Company Pages our developers love, organized into sub-categories to highlight what sticks out.

Last June, Fog Creek Software (now Glitch) generated a lot of attention by revealing company-wide salary information to all of its employees. Anil Dash, the company’s CEO, told Bloomberg that this level of transparency would draw much-needed attention to pay gaps across the country. “Transparency is not a cure-all and it's not the end goal,” he added. “It's a step on the way to the goal, which is to be fair in how we compensate everyone.”

Salary transparency, especially in the tech industry, is one of the year’s most talked about talent-acquisition trends. But how much has changed since Dash first spoke to Bloomberg? And will companies continue to make their employees’ salaries public over the next three to five years?

We reached out to HR executives, and continued the conversation with Dash, to get their take.

Fall is a season of new beginnings. Students are full of optimism about a new school year. People break sweaters out of storage for cooler temperatures and holiday celebrations. And even trees get in on the transformation. At Stack Overflow, we’re celebrating fall with a form of renewal entirely our own: by allowing companies to refresh their employer branding strategy for developers.

After evolving our Talent platform to include things like improved reporting on Job Listings and more responsive Company Pages, we declared September “Back to Branding” month. To celebrate, we encouraged employers to update their Company Pages on Stack Overflow. A team of our developers then reviewed these changes asking: upon reviewing these pages, where would I want to work (if Stack Overflow wasn’t so great)?

Based on our engineers’ feedback, here are ten company pages they love, organized into sub-categories to highlight what stuck out about the companies.

For many organizations, the process of establishing salary ranges is almost a yearly tradition. Typically, employers consider a variety of factors, such as the importance of each role and the company’s financial standing, to determine pay rates for each job. While average market rates influence this process, it’s difficult for many leaders to find reliable information about developer salaries.

But with the amount of data available today, many employers are taking another look at their compensation strategies. There are a few critical questions that these organizations ask themselves. What are developers earning on the open market? How do our offerings compare to what programmers will find elsewhere? How much room do we have to increase our budget and compete for tech talent?

To answer these questions for your company, here are a few things that fair pay scales for developers have in common.

Many aspects of the technology landscape change on an almost constant basis. As a result, even the most established companies in the world are starting to see themselves as technology-driven organizations. But as the business landscape evolves, one thing has remained consistent: For the developers driving this innovation, salary is one of the most crucial job evaluation criteria.

Today, talent acquisition leaders have more insights about developer salaries than they’ve had in years past. While salary data can help you optimize your hiring strategy in many ways, it also creates new challenges for employers. Each time salary predictions are updated, it also equips developers to compare their compensation to current market trends. If they find that they’re earning less than their peers, it’s not difficult for them to find new job opportunities.

So how should salary trends influence developer salary increases? Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Out of all the topics that we’ve covered on this blog, employer branding is our third largest category—and for good reason. Large organizations such as The Washington Post have made subtle tweaks to their employer branding strategy that enable them to attract and engage with developers. There’s also plenty of data that suggests that there are serious financial implications for companies that don’t make branding a priority.

Over the last few years, developers have said that company culture is one of their top priorities in a new job. In response, many talent acquisition leaders are applying storytelling concepts to their employer branding strategy. When you hear the word “storytelling,” you probably think about long-form articles or novels that inspired and moved you deeply.

But are developers looking for a traditional story arc that’s inspired by your company mission? Or are they just looking for the facts? We asked a few developers about how they evaluate a company’s employer branding story. Here’s what they had to say.

With an ever-changing technology landscape, even the most seasoned executives tend to be more reactive than proactive about hiring developers. Over the last few years, experts have recommended an agile approach to tech recruiting, which involves adapting based on short feedback cycles. We even made the argument for building tech teams with that approach back in 2015.

At the same time, KPMG and Harvey Nash found that 65% of CIOs still feel that a lack of talent holds back their organization. So how can you strike a balance between adapting to unexpected change and supporting your company through developer hiring?

As part of a process known as strategic workforce planning, talent acquisition leaders seek to align their priorities with the needs of their companies. With just a few months remaining in the year, this is an ideal time to start thinking through this, especially from a tech recruitment standpoint. In this post, we’ll explore why it’s essential to have a long-term plan in place to maintain and grow your technical staff.

As the summer winds down, this is an ideal time for your technical recruiters to prepare for one final push to fill their critical open roles. Because they face intense competition for tech talent, they’re probably laser-focused on nothing but hitting their hiring goals before the end of the year.

But for talent acquisition managers, the next few months are important for identifying priorities for 2019 and beyond. Which developer roles will you need to hire for this time next year, and what will it cost to do so?

Still, with looming deadlines remaining for the current calendar year, it’s easy to delay creating future recruitment budgets until it’s absolutely necessary. To help jumpstart your 2019 planning, here are a few benefits of starting right now.